For this project, you’ll develop the majority of glyphs for a font, starting with sketches before moving into TypeTool:
- full English alphabet in lower- and upper-case,
- two ligatures (fi and fl)
- 0 – 9, and
- a subset of punctuation marks (double and single left/right quotes, period, comma, exclamation point, question mark, em dash and hyphen).
Designing a font requires a lot more work and creativity than most people think, so the project is broken into several stages to make it more manageable.
Design Brief
Begin by writing a design brief for your font. Read this article about what should be included in your brief. We’ll share these in class, the you’ll revise them as necessary after getting feedback. Your brief should be 100 to 150 words long.
Tip: Your brief should say whether your font will be designed for headings (called a “display font”) or long stretches of text (“body text”). Display fonts are generally easier to design; body text fonts require a surprising amount of subtlety and skill. You can choose whichever you like, but a display font will likely be easier to do.
Sketch Variations
Start by creating some basic glyphs in at least three distinct variations. It’s common to start with an /o/ and /d/ but you can choose different glyphs. (This portion of the assignment will also be graded—pass/fail—as part of your sketchbook.)
There are two key things to keep in mind here:
- The glyphs you choose should show a font’s character or style. You probably don’t want to start with a /./ and a /I/ because those don’t give the font a lot of space to shine.
- The three variations should be pretty different. Play with things like stroke contrast, x-height, counter size, etc. Minor variations in the angle of a serif are best left until later in the process, after you’ve got the basics worked out.
You’ll also share the sketches in class and revise them until you’re comfortable with how your handful of glyphs look.
Handgloves
In the next step, you’ll sketch large versions of the glyphs for “Handgloves”—you’ll do this on 8.5′ x 11 paper. Once you’re done, we’ll scan them so they can be imported into TypeTool as backgrounds for each glyph to guide your work creating the outlines.
TypeTool
Here’s where most of your time will be spent: Designing all of the glyphs in the list above. As we’ll discuss in class, fonts (at least good ones) share a lot of material from one glyph to the next, so you won’t be creating every glitch from scratch. The DNA of a professionally designed font guides glyph construction so that the characters look like they belong together.
For example, if you start by designing the /o/ and the /l/, you can use those paths (or portions of them) to create /p/, /d/, /q/, and /e/. The /H/ can give you material for /I/ and /T/ (and, depending on your specific font, might provide sources for /X/, /M/, and /N/.
Grading Criteria
Design Brief (10%): Is the brief complete and informative?
Glyph Variations (20%): Do the sketches show exploration of a design space or are the just rote, minor repetitions?
Handgloves (15%): How well does the font work after the large-scale sketching?
Complete set of glyphs (20%): Does it include all of the glyphs listed in the description above?
Coherence/DNA (25%): Do the glyphs all feel like they’re part of the same font? Note that some fonts intentionally include some quirks to give them visual interest, but those should both appear intentional and should complement, not overshadow, the font’s feel.
Difficulty (10%): A very simple geometric sans requires less work than a humanist serif (usually). And as I said above, a display font is a (often) a little easier than an elegant body text font.